A Visual Model for Web Applications Security Monitoring
This addresses web application security for operators, but appears incremental as it builds on existing visualization techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting complex web application attacks that automated systems miss by proposing a visual model for human-assisted security monitoring, with testing showing it helps understand security structure.
This paper proposes a novel visual model for web applications security monitoring. Although an automated intrusion detection system can shield a web application from common attacks, it usually cannot detect more complicated break-ins. So, a human-assisted monitoring system is an indispensable complement, following the "Defense in depth" strategy. To support human operators working more effectively and efficiently, information visualization techniques are utilized in this model. A prototype implementation of this model is created and is used to test against a popular open source web application. Testing results prove the model's usefulness, at least in understanding the web application security structure.